Until I read this fascinating story in Sports Illustrated about how basketball coach George Raveling, while a young volunteer assistant coach, ended up with the original copy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, I had not realized that the most magnificent passages were completely ad-libbed in. I knew King had ad-libbed a part of it, but not that he did the whole soaring conclusion off the cuff (albeit with ideas and phrases he had used before). What a thing of euphonious beauty it was.

I love the earlier parts of the speech as well — especially the way that King rightly placed the moral urgency of civil rights not in opposition to the Constitution, but in furtherance of its promises.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Today’s radicals try to pretend that our Founding was a benighted, indeed an immoral, enterprise. The truth, as King understood, is that the Founding was a great leap of freedom that set the predicate for the full promise of freedom later to be realized. The civil-rights movement was needed not to correct the Constitution, but to bring it and the Declaration together into full fruition. Later in the speech, King returned again to patriotic themes, of American as a blessed land and a good nation, one worth celebrating via the familiar hymn we sing of our country, sweet land of liberty, land of the pilgrim’s pride . . .

This, too, is a great passage, relevant today:

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.
We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

Finally, it is worth noting, always noting, that King’s message was not an “us vs. them” spiel, but a clarion call that “we’re all in this together.”

When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing

We should all, evermore, share this dream.